


Diamond Dogs

by Jane St Clair (3jane)



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Disturbing Themes, F/M, Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-05
Updated: 2011-08-05
Packaged: 2017-10-22 06:36:37
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,179
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/234979
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/3jane/pseuds/Jane%20St%20Clair
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Come out of the garden, baby / You'll catch your death in the fog.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Diamond Dogs

 

She arrives weeks after they take his father away.

 

Draco's never been to Azkaban, and his parents would never tell him the things he wanted to know about it. His father said it was perverse to delve into such things. Prurient. Common. Gutter boys ask questions about the details of prisons, because that's where gutter boys went. Gentlemen managed their disgraces in other ways.

 

Even then, Draco knew he had family in Azkaban, though no one would talk about it. The Daily Prophet archives, bound in matte leather in the library, offered him a very full account of the war and its aftermath. High-profile wizards and witches charged with war crimes had their names printed in shimmering ink, so that the letters would linger in the back of your eye all day. Humiliating for everyone at the time, probably, but the name-shimmer made it easier for Draco to compare the headlines to his family tree.

 

The Malfoy family keeps excruciatingly correct genealogies. Disgraced members are still included, though their names are vaguely nauseating to look at. It doesn't do to marry one's relations by accident.

 

He would have known Bellatrix Lestrange anyway. Her portrait sat on his mother's dressing table all his life.

 

She comes to the door very calmly. Brushes her hands across the visitor-chimes and waits. Dark-haired woman like a shadow of Draco's mother, very elegant, only fraying around the edges if one looks at her too long. It might be a glamour, but it's a good one.

 

His mother doesn't look at her long enough to notice it. Recently, his mother mostly looks at her own hands. She would never descend to bite her nails, but her expression suggests she might like to. Draco is irritated by his mother's need to play Lady Macbeth. She ought to have the pride to remain a witch.

 

(He reads Shakespeare, though it's not on the Hogwarts curriculum. His father approves of it. A number of wizarding families claim Shakespeare as a member, but the Malfoys aren't among them. They know their members. And if the man doesn't show up as a blood relation anywhere in a thousand-year record, then he probably wasn't a wizard at all. It doesn't matter. Draco's father likes Sun Tzu as well.)

 

Bellatrix shimmers at her frayed edges like a proper midnight hag. Black and secret. She greets his mother with an extended hand, a lady's handshake, and a brief kiss on the cheek. Then she moves in.

 

Draco isn't sorry. With three people in the house, his mother at least feels obligated to keep up the household routine. There are regular meals, served at actual tables, rather than trays spirited in and out of rooms by the house elves. His mother puts on clothes every day. Occasionally she even takes a walk in the gardens.

 

Bellatrix reads a great deal during the daylight hours. She drifts through the house and touches odd objects, then collects whatever volume she's chosen and sits on the terrace. Draco look out across the lawns at her and sees bare shoulders, hours before dinner. He isn't sure how much of the rest of her is bare.

 

He reminds himself how long she was deprived of sunlight. He doesn't think about his father, locked in where she escaped.

 

She dines with them, in evening dress. Draco isn't sure where the evening robes came from, since they're quite current, and his aunt was locked away for fourteen years. She's very beautiful. Her hair always stays in place, high up off her neck, and her shoulders and chest are always bare. Not a dowager yet. Glitter on her shoes after dinner, when she dresses to go out. Black cloak, evening bag, portkey.

 

Draco knows she's going to the Dark Lord, but she does genuinely look as if she's going to a ball.

 

His mother doesn't know what to do with the evenings, so sometimes she makes Draco dance with her. His parents danced together nearly every evening they dined together. A box in the drawing room opens into a ghost orchestra. Spirits roll the carpets back, and Draco walks her through the dances of her choice.

 

He doesn't tango. His mother has a disturbingly bohemian streak that keeps her asking anyway.

 

Draco isn't quite sure what would happen if his father happened to return to find Draco and Narcissa in mid-tango.

 

He locks his bedroom door at night. He's not always *in* his bedroom, but he knows his mother checks the door.

 

At Christmas, she promised him a holiday. Draco chose Canada. There are wizards in the high Rockies, and places so powerful they spark. The lodge was booked, the portkey made, and his broom primed for mountain flying. His father was going to teach him how to hunt wild things from the air.

 

All holidays are cancelled because of the Dark Lord's return. Draco wouldn't be going anyway, because of his father. Draco isn't even supposed to go visiting. Officially, the doors of every wizard home in Britain are locked after dark.

 

Bother that.

 

Draco goes flying most nights. His snitch flickers in the dark, easy enough to follow. All good seekers have to be able to play in the dark -- proper games (not school games) don't end at nightfall. The insects rising off the lawns give him something to dodge, and the fireflies give him something to catch while the snitch is hiding.

 

Four catches in one night. No one expects him down for breakfast anyway.

 

He comes in at dawn, shaking thin rain off his cloak. His aunt is sitting in his room.

 

She has all her clothes on. Her hair is set. He wishes she wouldn't look at him like that.

 

"Aunt Bella."

 

"Draco."

 

Pause.

 

She says, "You're soaking wet."

 

"I was playing outside."

 

"You're hardly a child."

 

"I don't have anything else to do."

 

"Next time you feel like making a spectacle of yourself, tell me and I'll take you with me."

 

Draco feels a bit ill. He doesn't have any idea how to tell her 'no'.

 

"Don't be ridiculous. I won't take you to *him*, that's entirely your father's prerogative." She smirks.

 

Rubs her fingers over his cheek. Down his neck and into the collar of his shirt, and all he can do is stare at her. And stare. Then she brushes something bright and invisible onto his skin and he arches. His knees give.

 

Bellatrix leans over him while he shakes through the sick sexual glory of whatever she fed him and mouths his hair.

 

*

 

When he wakes up, there's an enamel box lying next to him on the bed. It's full of spiders. Draco likes it a lot.

 

*

 

She takes him to Scotland. They're both in dinner dress and cloaks, moving through a glittering/dingy Muggle city. Small, strange creatures dash out of the shadows and dance around her feet as she moves. The city ghosts brush past both of them.

 

Steel and glass flats-blocks rise up into the fog. If there's a grand pattern to her choices, he can't find it, but she always knows where she's going. Straight into Muggle homes. She chooses single women, mostly. Middle-aged or a little younger, mostly brittlely beautiful the way Narcissa is. Bellatrix has a distinct preference for blondes.

 

Doors open at a touch. All these women sleep on expensive sheets, curled in on themselves. Draco can see the grey in their hair so *clearly*. They haven't even used glamours to hide it, just cheap, unmagical potions. He can smell the chemicals on them.

 

Bellatrix whispers to them while they sleep. Conjures up their dreams and changes them. Small, vaguely incestuous details leak out of apparently simple situations. Sex and blood. Animals and body parts. Smoke and fear. All the colours melt down to blue and green and black. Every single woman screams. None of them wake up.

 

Muggles dream close to the surface of their minds. Raising the dreams out of their heads is easy. She casts the charm, so he won't set off the Ministry's alarms, but he can manipulate the spell once it's laid out. Draco adds dead fish, bloody vegetables, and his memories of unicorn blood to a woman's dreams.

 

She vomits in her sleep.

 

Bellatrix takes Draco out onto the balcony to clean him off, and she kisses him.

 

*

 

He finds her later reading the Prophet, which features the Minister of Magic in conference with the Muggle Prime Minister. Draco's never understood how a Muggle can safely be left in charge of a country he knows so little about. At least the previous Prime Minister was a Squib. She didn't suit the Dark Lord at all, but at least she knew what was going on enough to keep control.

 

She isn't in charge anymore. The Muggles have always hated Mrs Thatcher, but they can't be expected to appreciate her finer points.

 

Bellatrix says, "Would you like to meet him?" When Draco stares at her, she adds, "The Prime Minister."

 

"How could I?" The Malfoy name doesn't appear on the current register of ministerial guests.

 

"I'll take you."

 

*

 

There are wards, of course, and Muggle soldiers guard the Prime Minister's door. Only a single wizard sentinel, though, and he only tilts his face to Bellatrix's in greeting.

 

She bites him. Draco catches a glimpse of her ragged edges under the evening gloss. The wizard pants while she gnaws at his skin. It's very sexual. Rather sickening.

 

The Prime Minister sleeps curled beside his wife. She dreams about endless hallways filled with shallow water. He dreams of industrial disaster. His papers float away and dissolve in the chemical runoff. None of his pens will work. The sky turns orange and the countryside turns black.

 

Bellatrix calls up the edge of his dream and steps under it. She strips to the waist and lets her hair down. Grey in the black. All the mad fragments of her prison life pour out onto her face. Standing in the midst of a ruined world, she breaks all the Prime Minister's favourite objects and drowns his favourite people and smears him with sticky menstrual blood.

 

Watching from the edges, Draco can see it running down her leg. Very, very red in a grey and black and orange world.

 

The Prime Minister's frail. He cries in his sleep. Draco sees the wards around his heart; they can't kill him, but they can torture him like this and no one will know. He'll wake up tomorrow with Bellatrix lingering in his skull and nothing will make sense to him, and sometime in mid-afternoon an aide will say the wrong word and the man will break down in front of everyone.

 

The Muggles will be careful enough to keep that off the camera, but it will still be extremely messy.

 

*

 

The soldiers' eyes are glazed over. The wizard's curled in on himself, clutching his mutilated cheek and humming to himself.

 

Bellatrix tilts Draco's face to hers and kisses him in the street.

 

Behind him, someone says, "Oh Bella."

 

She lights up. Glittering beautiful and utterly mad, and *that* is what finally gets under Draco's skin. This second where he wants her completely, and she isn't even looking at him anymore.

 

Draco blinks. He isn't one hundred percent sure that the man he's looking at is the Dark Lord. They haven't been introduced.

 

"Is that Lucius' son?"

 

"Yes."

 

"Well, don't break him."

 

It's really fairly impressive how the man can disapparate without making more than a whisper.

 

*

 

He shouldn't like her. She's sticky and probably mad. But when they took his father away, Draco's world contracted to the Malfoy park, and he's been desperately bored for weeks. Bellatrix might be mad, and sometimes she's a little too direct about things, but she isn't boring.

 

He knows from the house-elves that she spends hours alone in her room, skinning whatever small creatures she can catch in the woods. Draco's skinned things before, for potions, but the things he skinned were dead first.

 

In mid-afternoon, he knocks on her bedroom door and finds her half-dressed and working. No robes, just an outline of clothes. Without the evening clothes to disguise her body, she's horribly thin, and her hair has a life of its own. Her mirror only shows scenes from the past. She brews her own makeup. He didn't know you could create that dusky colour out of swallows' blood and bones.

 

His mother's fading and his aunt is mad. Draco's the only man in the house.

 

She leaves smoky blood-dust on his wrist where she grips him. Draws him in to stand close in front of her and tilts her face up as soon as he bends.

 

She doesn't taste anything like the girls he's kissed at school. She also bites.

 

It hurts more than he expected. His face is the most fragile part of him, and she's *tearing* at it. Splits his lip and rubs the blood across him with her mouth and sucks on him like she can pull his breath out.

 

The fact that he's seriously thinking about sex with her implies he hasn't learned nearly as many lessons from Shakespeare as his father thought he would.

 

There are no plays about aunts. Not that he's ready anyway.

 

She smiles at him, bloody like she's been feeding on something recently dead. Walks him back to her bed and climbs on top of him, and now there's nothing elegant about her at all. She's predatory, all bones and edges.

 

She smells good.

 

Everywhere she touches him, he sparks. He wonders whether his father made this woman disappear just so Draco wouldn't be able to enjoy her.

 

Naked, she's nothing like a girl. Female, but raw and thin-skinned. He can trace the paths of her veins. Very, very hot all over. Her bones interest him; she's like the diagrams in books he liked, before he was old enough to go looking for books about sex instead.

 

He doesn't notice any of this for a while. Initially, mostly what he thinks about is *woman* and *naked* and *sex*.

 

Slick inside her and in her mouth, and she lets him be on top. He's aware of how awkward he is, but she growls whenever he tries to slow down. She might just be feeding off how much he loves this. Nails dig into his back and afterwards, when he's sprawled face-down and panting, he thinks he sees her licking his blood off her fingertips.

 

He doesn't really care.

 

It starts to rain and a house-elf comes in to close the french doors. There's a moment of scandalized bug-eyes watching him, long enough to make Draco wish he were of age and could shut the doors himself, without actually getting up.

 

Somewhere down in the kitchen tonight, all the house elves are talking about the young master and the mistress' sister.

 

He could kill off his mother and they could rule the house themselves.

 

They could just lock his mother in the attic. She might not even notice.

 

Bellatrix catches Draco's face in her hand and turns him to look at her. She says, "No."

 

He wonders whether Bellatrix would visit her, if they locked Narcissa up there.

 

*

 

In the morning, he finds Bellatrix reading on the terrace. He isn't one for kneeling, but he goes when she pushes him down. He's good with his tongue, at least. It redeems him a little for the frantic mess he made of sex last night. She growls when she comes.

 

He wanders through the house for half an hour with her smeared across his face. His mother walks into the library after him, studies him for a moment, then winces and leaves.

 

*

 

He has no idea how this is supposed to end. In Shakespeare they'd all die, because this definitely is not a comedy. If this were a history, Draco suspects he wouldn't be involved in the central plot. In a romance Lucius would come back and forgive them all, and brush the miserable madness out of Narcissa's eyes.

 

Malfoys are Shakespearean, but they're tragedies to the core, and it's starting to worry him.

 

He goes looking into other writers, but the patterns are all the same. In Herodotus, he finds the suggestion that an appropriately organized coup at this point could save him and Bellatrix both, but he's not sure whom he needs to kill.

 

*

 

For Draco's thirteenth birthday, his father gave him a set of door wards. They're keyed to him, pre-enspelled. It means he can lock his door -- really lock it -- without spellcasting. The wards don't, for whatever reason, keep house elves out, but wizards can't move through them.

 

When he locks his bedroom door at night, he sets the wards too. He'd love to go out flying, but he doesn't really want to be out in the open.

 

People are going to hunt him down. His uncle Rodolphus, almost certainly. (Where *is* Rodolphus? He and Bellatrix are still married; their marriage shimmers on the family rolls.) His father. The Dark Lord. Maybe his mother. All the scandalized house elves in the district.

 

He lies on his bed and reads. When fiction starts making him nauseous, he does his homework.

 

Twice during the night, he feels something female push at the wards. Power surges and fades and she goes away.

 

He's aware that hiding from her is childish. That doesn't mean he has to come out.

 

*

 

At breakfast, neither Bellatrix nor his mother speaks to him. Draco takes his broom and goes out to practice Quidditch. When he comes in, he makes a point of throwing all his clothes on the floor.

 

When he doesn't come down for dinner, the house elves bring him a tray. One of them has drawn a happy face in coloured sugar on his dessert.

 

*

 

He's given up on his homework. The comics he stored away under his bed years ago are still there. Boy wizards battle large, sticky monsters of dubious intelligence.

 

Around ten at night, his mother knocks on his door. He knows it's her because the wards flare with her aura, and because Bellatrix would never knock.

 

She drifts in without looking at him when he opens the wards. Sits on his bed and fingers his comics while he re-sets the barrier. He doesn't quite know what to say to her, but he isn't entirely sorry she's there. She'll talk to him when she's ready.

 

It takes a long time. Draco dozes off and wakes up with his mother curled up behind him, near but not quite touching.

 

Draco says, "Make her go away. Please."

 

His mother shifts. "I don't know how."

 

*

 

In the morning, the house elves bring trays for both of them, and a change of clothes for Narcissa. She plays chess with Draco and reads books the elves conjure.

 

Downstairs, strangers seem to be moving in. Draco can't quite see the front entrance from his window. After a while, he pulls the curtains and stops looking.

 

He and his mother settle in. He's not sure they'll ever be able to come out.

 

 


End file.
